ESR: To liberalize or to perish: Europe's political and economic future

ESRTo liberalize or to perish: Europe's political and economic future

According Philip H. Gordon of YaleGlobal Online, "State spending in the EU averages 48 percent of its Gross Domestic Product, compared with only around 36 percent in the United States; social expenditures average over 25 percent, compared with just 15 percent" (Gordon 3). In other words, the typical European government controls nearly half of the resources of its country, a fact which constitutes an immense power base for European politicians and a means by which they can carry out regulatory schemes of a vast caliber. More often than not, these schemes will restrict the individual's ability to freely prosper and innovate by employing a level of personal liberty and independence absolutely indispensable to a globalizing world.

Indeed, the degree of government economic intervention in Europe is all the more tragic and lamentable because Europe presently has an unprecedented opportunity to prosper economically due to globalization. During prior decades, European economies have been players on the global arena, and have thereby benefited despite gargantuan government intervention. IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus cites the example of German export growth from 1990 to 1995, at a rate of 10 percent per year to Third World countries, to illustrate the benefits that new markets throughout the world offer to European business. At the same time, German exports to other industrial countries had increased by only three percent per year. Thus, globalization, if tapped fully, could offer more than a threefold economic advantage over trade limited to its "traditional" scope.

Aside from repealing deleterious economic regulations, the European Union and national governments should renounce all ambitions to govern personal lives and practices as well, and should reform their legal codes to render them concise, straightforward, and comprehensible to the intelligent layman. If European politics is thus liberalized, Europe in general might follow in the footsteps of Ireland and Britain in realizing immense economic progress by tapping into the opportunities rendered available by globalization. As the renowned British thinker John Stuart Mill wrote, "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant." Will European bureaucrats abandon the desire to regulate people into economic stagnation "for their own good"? Given the extensive presence of rigidly collectivist nationalist and socialist political movements in Europe, one might seriously doubt that their followers will eagerly rush to fulfill the aims of liberalization. If they do not, however, they must prepare for the inevitable economic and social decay that will result from a continuation of the status quo.